Some computers of Pentium II (usually 300 MHz or less) vintage and older which have very old BIOS code do not have ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Instead, many of these machines use APM (Advanced Power Mangement). However, the APM module, although loaded by default in VectorLinux, will by itself not enable such computers to fully shutdown properly. To enable proper shutdown an APM parameter must be passed to the Kernel at boot.

If you have such a machine which does not shutdown properly then you should do the following:

a) if you use lilo as your bootloader:-add "apm=power-off" to the kernel parameter append lines for each boot stanza in /etc/lilo.conf, for example: